


Death of Virtue

by GeminiLoveCA



Series: Virtue [2]
Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-19
Updated: 2015-10-19
Packaged: 2018-04-27 04:14:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5033311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GeminiLoveCA/pseuds/GeminiLoveCA
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Virtue is down, not out. Not.... yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Death of Virtue

I licked my wounds that night in the barn, physical and proverbial. Samson said nothing through the process. Perhaps he had no idea what to say, or perhaps he thought I’d have lashed out at him again had he tried. I shed no more tears as he smeared salve on the welts and scabs criss-crossing my skin, only nodded in thanks as he left me in the barn with the softest of the horse blankets to wrap around myself as protection from the wind that swept through the chinks in the walls.

The next day, I marched back to the house, only to be directed to help with laundry as my services were not required above stairs. It was insult to injury, although Polly took a modicum of pity and presented me with a bundle of my belongings she had sneaked out from the servants’ quarters. After a day working over wash tubs and wringing out linens, my dry, spare dress would be a welcome sight.

The day’s work was tedious, and it allowed my mind to wander. Initially, I had felt angry and hurt, confused by my Sir’s sudden change of mind. New thoughts crept in, sparks of rage and hatred, licked to a rising flame as I watched him escort…. Her…. Into a carriage to go to town. He had not even glanced my way as the wheels passed only a few feet from where I worked, kicking up cold, sticky mud in their wake. As if I were nothing. Beneath him.

“You are.”

I turned, stretching the ache in my back from hunching over a scrub board for so long. Lucille held up the hem of her dress to avoid staining the dark emerald velvet. I swiped away a trickle of sweat from my temple and dropped the bar of soap into the tub with a splash. “I’m what?”

“Supplanted.”

My eyes narrowed as I glared at her, feeling my pulse thrumming in my throat. I hadn’t heard Lucille approach, which was odd. Usually, the large ring of keys at her waist gave away her location long before her footsteps. I looked to her waist. “I’m not the only one, it seems.” I grinned, feeling marginally better at the knowledge that not all my bite had been removed.

“He’s taken her in to two to get copies made.” Her eyes scanned my dress. “You’re soaked.”

“I’m also freezing. Do you have a declaration to make or may I finish my duties so I can change clothes and hang these up to dry?”

“Come upstairs. I still have a fire burning in my bedroom. You may warm yourself there.”

~~~

Afterward, with the evidence of our debauchery spread on the floor around us, Lucille and I lounged beside the fire. The heat made me pleasantly drowsy, oh so welcome after a fitful night on the tack room floor. I woke with a start, feeling Lucille’s nail trace along one spectacularly deep cut along my flank. I hissed at the touch against the tender skin.

“He is my brother and so I love him, perhaps more than I ought. But your devotion, I fail to understand. He beats you, marks you all over, hands you off to whomever is in his good graces at the time, and you always come back to him for more. He has treated you like a dog, always has.” She paused. “Actually, I think he treats the dog better now. At least he’s allowed to sleep in the house now that it’s snowing.”

“He hasn’t always.”

Her lips quirked. “And still to his defense… I’ll concede that point. Barely. He was different before Mother sent him away to school. I actually thought back then…”

“Those days are long gone, Lucille. This house has enough ghosts without stirring up old ones from the past.” I sat up, drawing up the corner of the blanket on which we had settled, wrapping it around me. “And why are you suddenly my new benefactor? You and I have never been bosom friends, even as children, our diversions aside.”

Lucille lifted a shoulder, a gesture so like her brother that my heart panged briefly. “My enemy’s enemy…” She rose, and I felt a sense of pride at how comfortable she was walking nude across the room. She returned with a pair of snifters and a bottle of Thomas’s good brandy. She poured and handed one to me.

I eyed it before taking a long draught. “Then here is to our mutual survival.”

~~~

Thomas refused to see or have anything to do with me for several long weeks. If he knew Lucille had taken to allowing me to sleep in the kitchen, he gave no mention. So it was no small surprise when he appeared in the kitchen, where I was polishing silver yet again, and told me to follow him.

Part of me wanted to chuck the platter in my hands at his head, but I set it aside and rose from my chair, letting him lead me to the bedroom we had often used before. “Did you need something, Sir?” I asked, allowing no emotion to filter into my voice.

“Are you still peeved about that incident? Pet…” He reached for a long of hair fallen from my braid, but I jerked backward, earning an arched eyebrow. His hand fell. “You knew this was how things had to be now.”

I shook my head, pushing past him to the door, “No, Sir, I didn’t. Wed her? Bed her? That I expected. You had to make all our lives that much more complicated by falling in love with her in the process. Because that will make it so much easier to get rid of her when she serves her purpose…”

He spun me, his open hand colliding with my cheek with a resounding sound. I caught his wrist as he moved for the second blow, shoving his hand aside. “And that is the last time you strike me, Sir.” I threw the door open, stalking away with my head held high. He may have cast me aside, but I would not be tossed scraps, toyed with… never again.

I was in the kitchen, giving the fireplace the scrubbing of its life when I heard the rustle of skirts. “What is it, Lucille? Come to share our common misery?”

“Not exactly.”

That voice. That sweet voice, dripping with misplaced hauteur, stopped me cold. I leaned back on my heels, dusting grime from my hands. “Ahh, Lady Edith. Did you need something?”

“Why did I see you leaving a bedroom with my husband?”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

Her spine stiffened. “I did. He said he asked you to clean it, as a possible replacement nursery, until the actual nursery was repaired and brought to rights. He said you refused. You need to pack your belongings and go.”

I laughed. Oh, I laughed until tears of mirth made tracks in the soot that smeared my cheeks. “Leave? I’m not leaving this house.”

“I’m the mistress of this house and I said you’ve been discharged.”

I stood at that. “Oh, be quite careful taking on that responsibility, missus. This house requires a lot of its owners.”

“Dearest, I thought you were resting. What are you doing out of bed? Let’s get you back upstairs. I’ll deal with the staff.” Thomas appeared and guided Edith away from me, casting a look my way over his shoulder. Let him come.

He found me as I was dumping out the wash water, stepping back just in time to save his shoes from a good dousing. “Virtue. I would have thought a few nights in the barn would improve your demeanor.”

I looked up from my stiff, chapped hands. I wanted him to be my Sir again, the man I would do anything to please. My heart yearned for his delicious pain and dark decadence, my body ached for his particular cruel touch, but his stiff posture and hooded gaze gave me nothing in return. “You and I both know that’s not the type of punishment that improves my demeanor.”

“She is my wife, Virtue. You owe her deference for that fact, if for no other!”

“Oh, so I owe her deference now, as what? My better? Tell me, Sir… what exactly is she better at than me, except perhaps the depth of her purse? Is that what finally won your heart, Sir?” Neglect and bitterness choked down my affections as I stepped closer. “Please let milady know she’ll have my deference when she can stand under her husband’s whip and torture half so well.”

I passed him on my way back to the kitchen. Lucille stood inside, her hand reaching for the tea to begin brewing. Dropping the washtub aside with a clatter, I reached past her for the other tea canister, the one set back further on the shelf. “Do it.”

She measured the herbs into the tea pot alongside the tea leaves, stepping back as they began to steep. “You take it to her.”

“She’ll not drink it if I do.”

Lucille’s lips twisted. “She trusts me nearly as much.”

“Perhaps, but Thomas trusts you.”

For a moment, Lucille looked at me, then her lips opened in surprise. “That is wicked, Virtue.” She took the tray upstairs, likely to Thomas’s workshop on the upper floors.

‘If he will not follow the plan, then we must force his hand.’

The tea worked, though not exactly as I hoped. I suspect she was only drinking part to appease Thomas, and discarding the rest. My mother’s blend was quite special. For a woman who wished to avoid a child, the brew was ideal, hastening her monthly on its course. Mother had always said for it not to be given to a woman already experiencing her bleed though. One would think as many years as Thomas has beaten me raw, he’d be used to waking to bloody sheets.

Once we realized she was not drinking the tea anymore, Lucille took to adding the herbs to her food. They hid just as easily in soup and roasted meats. It left her feeling unsettled, prone to fainting and weakness, and utterly unable to provide her husband with his marital rights. He lasted a week before he was insistent that I meet him somewhere.

What defense do I have for myself? It was a momentary weakness and a sense of triumph when he needed me so urgently that he couldn’t help but have me right in the room next to theirs. So ardent was he in his rutting that he could not keep himself silent, especially when my nails scraped at the nape of his neck.

Let her know that her husband sought out my comforts and company. I didn’t care. I would never leave Crimson Peak, and neither would she.

~~~

Edith looked even more wan than she had on her arrival, so pale and slender, I expected the next breeze to billow her away like so much smoke. It gave me a secret smile that lifted my shoulders through whatever chores were expected of me, even the care and keeping of the missus. Amazingly, knowing that Thomas would find me later, after she was bathed and cossetted and tucked into her bed, made it bearable.

I went to his workshop after, knowing he had made himself a cot there, when his thoughts bedeviled him too much. Worry had creased his brow, but it did not stop him from having base needs. His desire spurred on my own, how weak am I, how helpless to refuse, when my dark Sir lifts the strop from his bench…

Every stripe it left felt like a victory. I was more desired than her, stronger than her, darker than her, more alike to him and more suited in every way, and when he drove into me, the sweat of his flesh stinging in my wounds, our cries nearly overwrote her own.

We did not hear her sobs until my Sir fell across my back, sated and breathing heavily in my ear. I felt him go still, his manhood slipping from me as he softened. He said her name, the word carried mournfully as he rose, looking where she stood.

I peered around his shoulder, not even caring to right my dress as she clutched the door handle, her other arm wrapped around her frame.

“How could you?” Her eyes cut from him to me, displaying shades of every emotion. For him, hurt and sorrow, flicking to disgust and contempt as they landed on me.

Sir made to right his clothes, reaching for Edith with his other hand. “Edith, love…” She shook her head vehemently, moving out of his grasp.

I straightened, buttoning my own dress slowly, letting her see the full measure of his passion marked over my body, striped and welted. “You ought to thank me.”

“Virtue.”

“No, I’ll not be silent any longer. Yes, missus, you ought to thank me. To get down on those lily soft hands and unbruised knees and kiss my feet, for every dark, depraved instance I’ve ever experienced here. I’m happy to take them, but you could never endure. You, with your privilege and wealth, you get to see the courtly gentleman, the one who woos you sweetly to his bed. You get his name and his title. I’ve asked for so little, a bit of time now and then, and I take it, the things you cannot.”

Her scream rent the air as she pushed away from the door, in her indignation pushing Sir aside. I never saw her lift the chisel from his workbench. Not until it was buried several inches into my chest.


End file.
